I was right this minute checking out what events there are to do today in and around the Boulder, Colorado, area. A theme has just occurred to me: notice with me, if you will, exactly what percentage of self-help seminars use the word “empower” when describing what it is that the seminar is about. Time to look this up in the Apple dictionary…

empower |emˈpou(-ə)r|verb [ trans. ]give (someone) the authority or power to do something : nobody was empowered to sign checks on her behalf.• enable (someone) to do (something) : cryptography will empower individuals to control their information.• [ trans. ] make (someone) stronger and more confident, esp. incontrolling their life and claiming their rights : movements to empower the poor.

Did it occur to anyone that letting someone else empower you is giving up your own power?

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Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond. Denial, repression, all those psychological adaptations we developed in childhood were ways of not being there, because being there was too painful. Writing demands that we cut through and be where we are, like a cat gripping the side of a cement wall at the top of a ten-story building—stay there and look around and not blank out because it is too hard. If you learn what is in the present moment you can transport it.

— Natalie Goldberg

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It must be time for NaNoWriMo again. I’m in it for the fourth year in a row. I haven’t talked to Shirl yet, but I hope she joins up again. It’s nice having company on this trek through words and psyche.

I am also trying to get used to the shift back to normal time and away from Daylight Savings Time. Speaking of “time,” maybe that’s a good theme. Then again, any large, expansive noun like that makes for a good theme.

If you’re also doing NaNoWriMo, let me know. The more, the merrier, to coin a cliché.

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Technorati Tags: Daylight Savings Time, nanowrimo, Time

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!

– Thelonious Monk

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I have decided that Fall is most definitely here when I’ve gotten flu vaccinations, which I did last week and yesterday. Tracked down so far:

• regular flu shot
• pneumonia vaccine

So far, no H1N1 has shown up on my personal health radar. The Health Department was offering 1500 or so of them, but one evidently had to stand for a couple of hours in the rain to get one. It was on the other side of town, too. So now my body is busy building antibodies, leaving me too sluggish to do much more than read blogs now.

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I gotta print this thing out now…

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I sit here late at night on a cold and rainy midnight, readjusting my fingers to the Macintosh’s keyboard. I am not yet ready to hunker down into the partial hibernation that one goes into in the winter time. I look for color when the outer world is drained of it. Today there are maples whose color is so full of flame that the sight of them startles you even when you are expecting to see them.

The boiler is clanking away down in the basement, and now the house feels like the inside of a great tea kettle just about to boil.

Satchel the Cat was visiting the vet’s today — his stomach has been bothering him a bit, Buck says, but he eats just fine when I feed him. I might think that he was going to miss summer as much as I do, but he never goes outside, so the notion of what season it is is moot for him.

And now, sleep.

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